# Unclear Journal: 15 The mind moves in circles when it tries to understand itself. I have noticed this a thousand times—how thought chases its own tail, how consciousness attempts to observe consciousness, like an eye trying to see itself without a mirror. There is something inherently fugitive about truth. The moment you think you have grasped it, it dissolves. Not because truth is false, but because the very act of grasping transforms it into something else—something smaller, more manageable, and therefore less true. I watched a sparrow today, caught between two windows. It flew from one pane to the other, again and again, each collision with the glass a small violence of misunderstanding. The bird could not comprehend that what appeared open was in fact closed. It could not translate the world according to its need. And I thought: is this not what we do constantly? We mistake clarity for truth. We believe that what we can see through is negotiable space. There is a kind of honesty in confusion. When you admit that you do not know, something opens up—not knowledge exactly, but a widening. The rigid structures of certainty crack, and through those cracks, light enters in strange and unexpected ways. Words are prisons we build willingly. We fill them with meaning, seal the doors, and call this architecture language. Yet something always escapes. Something vital remains outside, moving in the margins, in the space between what we say and what we mean to say but cannot. The obscurity deepens, not because I am unclear in my thinking, but because clarity itself may be an illusion born of insufficient attention.

 
Ninety-Nine.
What riches does life possess that it has not already given us? A life that could not bring us happiness in even a single moment of our living—yet here we sit at death's door, beseeching that very life to forestall death, hoping once more for some fragment of joy. Here lies the poverty of our understanding; here is our deepest misery. As if our mere wish could halt death, as if she would draw her boat to shore simply because we desire it. No—we shall meet death still carrying an unfulfilled life, and by that same thread we return to this world again. Our hunger for life renders us restless; we fail to satisfy ourselves, so our longings remain unslaked even to the final hour. If we could see that we hold no reliable bond with this world, that there is no path to happiness through this life; if we could see that we dissolve into the invisible; if we could know that we move through a dream—this very awareness would illumine us. These truths, when they arise from within us, bestow wisdom upon us. A wise person dies a thousand deaths before death itself arrives. We must meet each moment of life with profound reflection, so that we might put our consciousness to use.

If one learns to meet death with awareness, when death finally comes and takes life from us, we shall not weep like a child whose toy has just been snatched away. Instead, we can welcome death, greet it with smiling grace, meet the experience of dying with triumph. We can say to death, "I was made for you; take me now, set me free!" When we speak to death this way, voicing our truth, our voice carries an absolute peace. We receive death as a blessing. When an ordinary person comes to know at least this much—that our death is certain—even that person embraces death as the illumined do. All his hopes in this life come to their final end; he feels no desire to return here again. The shadow of death hangs over every human always, but while the ignorant spend each moment of life in struggle against death, seized by its terror, the illumined person accepts the truth of death and lives each moment in peace. Fear may have many seeming causes, yet it has but one root. When we fear anything at all, it may appear on the surface to stem from some worldly reason, but if we look deeper, we shall see: the true cause of all our fears is death itself. The root of all fear is planted in death.

When fear comes to us of losing our wealth, we dread becoming destitute, we fear poverty—but look deeper and we shall understand: this is not truly fear of losing money, nor fear of hardship. This is fear of death. When our finances decline, what we truly fear in our hearts is this: if some grave illness strikes us, where shall we find the means for treatment? If we must seek a doctor beyond our borders yet lack the means, then we might die! Without money, how shall we save ourselves?

Our fear of poverty is truly our fear of death, because we want to stop death, we want to live a little longer, but for that we need money. Money brings certainty to our life, it feeds our body. When the person we love—perhaps our life companion, or someone very close to us—lies on a deathbed, death’s fear descends upon us as well, because our beloved is part of our own life, we regard the person we love as our other half, and when that half of ours begins to separate from us, we undergo a partial death.

The death of those close to us, whose loss is entangled with our emotions, weakens us within, erodes us partially, and each such fear of partial death brings us closer to death itself. We are not truly afraid of losing the person we love; rather, we are afraid of our own death. Because the death of our beloved causes a partial death within us, and as a result, we are no longer the person we were before—we remain half-dead. When we love someone, we flourish ourselves, which is why we cherish that love. So it can be said that all love in the world is fundamentally love for keeping ourselves well. When our beloved dies, we feel that it would have been better if I had died with that person, and we begin to wish for our own death, because living on without that part becomes unbearable to us. To die moment by moment with only a fragment of our being seems worse than the death of our entire existence, which appears to us as peace. Because that fragment keeps inflicting the agony of death upon us—without that person, we seem to die a thousand times each day. We die every moment, in every moment of fear we die, and such deaths are not the proper path of death. For our true death happens only once, and it brings us the taste of living fully in our life, our true death ends the hunger and craving for death that rises from within us.

One Hundred.

When we do something in the right way, through the right method, there is no need to do it a second time. When we die once, properly, there is no need for us to return. There is a story told about this matter. Many years ago, there was a musician who was popular for his melodious voice. He believed he sang very well, but he was in fact only a beginning-level singer. He had learned with great difficulty merely the first letters of music, but he had the habit of standing on stage and singing; he liked to travel around performing in various places. But he sang in places where no one knew anything about music, not even the basic concepts of it. For this reason, he believed himself to be a very good singer and took pride in himself. Once, he went to sing in a place where there were some people experienced in music, people who truly knew it. After he had sung just one line on stage, the listeners there wept and asked him to sing more. After struggling to sing this way eight or ten times, he felt great pain in his throat and lips, so he apologized to the audience, saying that he could sing no more because he had already become very exhausted.

But his listeners would not let him go. He thought his audience was mad with the melody of his song, desperate to hear more, and he felt quite proud of himself. Yet he had grown so utterly exhausted that he could sing no longer. He begged forgiveness from his listeners, but they told him that as long as he could sing in the proper manner, he must continue singing. The singer was wounded by their words. All this time he had labored under the false belief that he was on the right path, that his listeners were so intoxicated by his melody they kept returning for more songs. But when he finally understood—when he realized his listeners had been weeping all along as they listened to his singing, crying out for him to sing again in order to correct his mistakes—he was hurt. He found his error. And he thought: Oh, what a fool I have been!

Often the Creator places us in the same circumstances again and again. This does not mean we are precious to Him; it means we have not performed the task in the proper manner. The Creator wishes for us to complete the work in the right way. Sometimes we are sent back to this world not because we are especially dear to the Creator, not because we are someone important for the world, but because the manner in which we have lived our lives is wrong. The Creator gives us chance after chance so that we might gather the experiences of life on the right path and return to Him. For if even the smallest trace of error remains within us, we cannot merge with the Creator. He is not incomplete; He does not accept imperfection. That is why He sends us again and again—so that we return to Him complete in experience. Because somewhere within us imperfection lingers; we return to the Creator carrying that incompleteness with us. For the Creator, imperfection is unacceptable. He receives only perfection.

As long as we fear death, love can never be born within us. Because love is the path to the Creator. Love is a prayer, meditation, worship. It is adoration; sometimes it is remorse. Love brings forth the essence of all things. Love is the final stage of spiritual practice. That dwelling place of practice is still very, very far from us.

Almost all our notions about love are false. What we call love is not true love; it is merely a symbol that we employ outside of any cosmetic use. It may take many forms, but it is not what we imagine love to be. The person who knows that to know love is to know the Creator—for such a person, nothing else remains to be known. The person who dies filled with love—that is their ultimate death. If one is educated in the teachings of such love, there is no reason for them to return to this world again. To become a true lover, one must erase oneself, must obliterate the very essence of one’s ego. The sooner we can wipe away our ego from within ourselves, the sooner we become true lovers. When we have become completely lovers, then we will see that we have arrived at the Creator’s door. The Creator has heard our prayer’s call and come to us. He has opened His gate for us. He has accepted our love.

Like wanderers, when we search for the Creator in temples, our inner self—our ego—only grows stronger, takes comfort in its own importance. And so, whatever we do in the Creator’s name, the frustration of not finding Him storms through us. Because we have searched for the Creator in every temple, that very pride gives birth within us to a supreme self-satisfaction, a self-conceit—which brings us only false contentment, never the Creator’s presence. Each moment we shrink back from the Creator out of fear of death, we cannot find Him. To reach the Creator, we must step away from the fear of death, dissolve ourselves completely in the Creator’s love—only then is it possible. For as long as even a trace of our ego-self remains within us, we cannot dissolve into the Creator’s love. The very condition for finding the Creator is the complete annihilation of our egotistic being. A true lover never hesitates to dissolve himself to reach his beloved; fear of death never touches him. Instead, he meets all the small and great trials of this world in such a way that, arriving at life’s final moment, he may depart with a full heart, knowing he has tried to fulfill his duty, to give his utmost with whatever strength he possessed.

One Hundred and One.

Our distance from what we love is bound up with our ego. The more ego we bring before our beloved, the greater our distance from them. As our ego lessens, as our self-hood grows transparent, so does our distance shrink. When we become entirely free of ego, then our love reaches its highest place, then our love conquers. Thus our beloved has never moved away from us; what matters is how far we ourselves have kept them at bay. There is no distance between us and the Creator—none whatsoever. What we call distance is entirely the result of our deluded self-hood. The path between myself and my Creator is straight. The more we clear away our ego, the shorter that path becomes. When our ego is entirely cleansed, even if we sit in our own home, the Creator’s door will appear before us. This means the distance between us and our Creator is not even a point—the Creator is that near to us. The Creator has never closed His door to us; we alone have kept ourselves away.

Ego is such a poison, breeding bitterness within us. We believe it will help us reach the Creator, win the Creator’s love, purify our minds and transform them into new forms. But when we see it has not enriched us even a little, but instead bred false notions and unreality about the Creator—only then do we truly understand its harm. When we enter a temple, we think the Creator dwells only there; we count ourselves fortunate to have arrived, something many have never managed; now we wish to prove ourselves great and blessed before others, for the Creator has shown us His house! I ask: is there anywhere the Creator’s creation does not exist? Where the Creator’s creation is, can the Creator be absent? Since we ourselves are the Creator’s creation, why do we search for the Creator’s house outside ourselves?

When shall we finally learn to use our self-knowledge aright?

Is there in all the temples of worship even a fraction of the Creator’s presence that dwells within us? Does the beauty of these sanctuaries surpass, equal, or fall short of the craftsmanship the Creator has wrought into this body of ours? Were any of these temples made by the Creator’s own hand, the way He fashioned us? When we leave a temple, our ego swells all the more—for we have been taught to polish and perfect our sense of self until we believe it flawless. We have never undone ourselves; instead, we have only burnished and refined the self, as though the Creator had left us in a state of filth. True love dwells within us only when every hollow within ceases to ring—when emptiness itself has no ground to stand on, when there is neither word nor the awareness that we are empty. Only then do we grasp the Creator’s majesty.

So long as we retain even the faintest sense of emptiness, we are not wholly pure. All our perceptions, our ego, our words, our voids, our gains—all shall vanish when the Creator’s word reaches our ears. Wherever we stand, in crowds or in silence, the Creator’s word echoes from within us. This is the moment when all the experiences of life come to their end. This is why love has been bound to death—because love’s first condition is that the lover dies before love can be. When in love, the duality of lover and beloved dissolves into nothing, and only love remains. That alone is true love. In such love, the fragrance of love spreads everywhere. Our love for the Creator reaches this very threshold, and there arrives that hour when we are freed from this world’s play, never to return here again. As when fishermen cast their nets, the small fish slip through the mesh while only the larger catch is held—and the fisherman releases the smaller ones back into the river—so too, when we have grown worthy in the Creator’s sight, He lifts us finally from this vast ocean of creation. Until that moment comes, He grants us again and again the chance to grow worthy of being taken.

Those who empty themselves in the Creator’s love are always ready for His summons. When death comes to their door, they rejoice, thinking: now at last I am freed forever from this narrow net of life. But those who magnify this earthly existence see death as life’s end, whereas a wise soul knows it as eternal liberation and joy. Here lies the difference between the true lover and the common person. To the illumined mind, this world is a dream-realm. We see death as the eye of a dark night, as the shadow of this life’s darkness; but to the wise, death is the beginning of a life beyond. That beginning becomes possible only when we have lived this life rightly. For it is the rightness of our living that brings us a rightness of dying.

We must find that path of death where death comes but once, where if death arrives we need never return to this world again. For we keep escaping death’s net again and again, returning over and over to walk this same path of life.

One Hundred and Two.

To elevate ourselves to higher stages of life, we must become like the great fish—so large that when death casts its net, we slip through the mesh and do not return. We can only grow so large when we shed all trace of ego. We must constantly free ourselves from the influence of our self, remain so vigilant in all our actions that our ego cannot steal in unawares and possess us, for the work happens with such subtlety that we may not even know when we have changed. Our ego makes us fragile. It will not listen to another, it entangles itself in its own coils, and sometimes in trying to untangle its own knot, it wounds itself. The nature of our ego is remarkably complex. Arrogance never brings simplicity; if a teacher is arrogant rather than humble, it becomes impossible for him to be a true teacher, and this is why the arrogant never become gurus. All the tangles within us are created by this ego-self. A person who makes his life dependent on medicine may recover from illness, may even maintain physical health, yet he cannot live a single day without that medicine. Our ego is like this medicine in our life—it may simplify our complicated situations, but in the end we become driven by it, dependent upon it. Then without ego we cannot solve even one problem; in truth, it makes life increasingly more complicated.

We must cast off our ego and search for the true causes of our mental complexities—what lies at their root, what things feed them, what creates our entanglement, or from what perspective we see them as complicated—these questions we must ask ourselves from beyond our ego-self. When we proceed this way, the pure thoughts within us will show us a straight path, which will bring simple solutions to the very problems that we, driven by ego, had made complicated. All our conflicts arise from this self-centeredness. Ego is a complex condition, and surrender is its simple remedy. If we pay attention, we will see that all the sacred texts of the world teach surrender—they tell us to yield. When we surrender to something—whether it be mental, physical, or in any other way—it always opens before us a path of simple solution and peace, untangles our complicated situations, breaks through our mental conflicts. When we look at a problem with eyes closed, it appears different to each person—this is natural. A guru’s work is to open the disciple’s eyes and help him see the problems clearly. Our ego closes our eyes, so we cannot see problems as they truly are; through surrender our eyes open, and because we can then see the problem’s true form, finding its solution becomes easy.

# The True Guru

A guru who does not open the eyes of our mind but instead offers solutions to our problems in exchange for money is never a true guru. If we go to someone’s presence where our problems may be solved, yet every time a problem arises we must run to them again, then we must understand that we are not in the right presence. For a true guru does only one work: opening the eyes of the disciple. The solving of problems is not his task. When we accept such solutions in exchange for money, it is not a guru-disciple relationship—it is merely a service, something that can be bought with money. To depend on a guru for every problem in life means living a medicine-dependent life, an ego-dependent life. Such a soul has no liberation, for such a soul is dependent on others. How problems appear to closed eyes can be understood through a story. Imagine you place an elephant before a group of people born blind and ask them to say what it is. Since these people are blind, since they have never seen with their own eyes what an elephant is or what it looks like, they will touch various parts of the elephant and present their understanding of it. Some, touching only the elephant’s leg, might say the elephant is like a tall tree. Others, touching its ear, might say it is like a tent. Still others, holding its belly, might say it is something egg-shaped. In this case, can anyone’s account give a true description of the elephant? If we did not know these people were blind, what would we call them? Surely we would call them experts!

A person who can present such varied descriptions of an elephant—is he not an expert? Yet what more can those who are themselves blind possibly do? The guru who is always busy solving our problems is such an expert. All experts are blind, for it is the rule that one must become blind in order to become an expert. When we view our problems with closed eyes, that is how things appear to us. In such a case, only a dedicated mind can open the eyes of the heart. An expert knows how to present many aspects of a single subject, because he has spent all his time on that one subject. Yet even so, he cannot present what the subject fundamentally is, because he does not know other subjects related to it. He has examined only one foot of that elephant in detail—and that is why he can speak only about that one foot. He knows nothing whatsoever of the whole. This is why experts can never solve their own problems. They run to others to solve their various difficulties. They do not even know how to diagnose their own diseases. Before us stand many people who perhaps know one subject well, but when any other subject is placed before them, they pretend they have understanding of it and indeed of all such subjects. They will not even admit they do not know. They simply cling to their false beliefs. This is why they become angry so easily and over such small things.

**One Hundred Three.**

Ignorant people do not know how to take their own ignorance naturally. They are driven by their ego. Such people generally give advice to others, but sad though it is to say, they themselves never follow the advice they give.

# The Master and the Disciple

There is an account concerning this matter from the life of the Prophet. One day a devotee came to him and said, “Master, my son consumes an excessive amount of jaggery, but I ask you—is eating so much jaggery good for the body? I have tried to make him understand many times, but he refuses to listen to me. If you would be kind enough to speak to my son about this, he will surely heed your words.” The Prophet then asked the man to return with his son after seven days. When the man arrived seven days later with his boy, the Prophet forbade him from eating jaggery in excess and explained its harmful effects to him. As they were about to leave, the boy’s father asked the Prophet, “Master, you could have spoken to him that very day, but instead you asked us to wait seven days. Why did you need this time?” The Prophet replied, “I myself love jaggery dearly and eat a great deal of it. How could I give your son advice that I myself do not follow? These seven days I have refrained from my excessive consumption of jaggery, and only then did I offer him that counsel. This is why I asked you to return after seven days.” The man then understood the meaning of the Master’s instruction.

Advice that cannot be applied to one’s own life, counsel that does not spring from lived experience, instruction that serves no purpose in one’s own existence—such advice is worthless. A true master learns from his own life; he does not acquire these lessons from books. This is why the teaching of a genuine master is always grounded in life itself. Experts are forever dependent on books; they learn nothing from life. All their knowledge is borrowed from pages, and so in any difficulty, you will see them consulting their texts. They cannot speak a single word beyond what is written there. Though they may solve the body’s physiological ailments, they know nothing of the mind’s troubles. They are entirely ignorant of the connection between body and mind in a human being. But a true master knows all matters relating to the body, understands the states of the human mind, and recognizes that almost every problem involves the union of both body and soul. This is why he knows that the solution to all human suffering lies within the person themselves—there is no need to look elsewhere, no need to become dependent on others.

An expert wishes to solve something that, in truth, has no existence at all. A master knows that when there is no such thing as a separate self, there is no question of solving anything. How can one who has dissolved themselves, who possesses nothing of their own, have any problems? Problems arise only where something remains, where something persists. Our true troubles begin here—we imagine ourselves to be so many things, and from this imagination arise all our complications. Is this not obvious? If we ever wish to come into the presence of such a master, one who has lost himself and knows the void within, then we must surrender ourselves entirely at his feet. For a true master is one who has drawn near to the Creator. This is why he knows what the Creator is, and to know the Creator, one must first surrender oneself at the feet of the master—for only he knows the path by which the Creator may be found. In this regard, before the Creator himself, a disciple’s master is his creator.

# On Surrender and the Path to the Creator

Because the Creator alone is our only teacher, and he knows the Creator best who has learned from the Creator himself—not in any university of this world. Only a true guru can know the Creator fully, and for this reason one must first surrender oneself to such a guru.

Surrender itself is the key to the Creator’s path. When we surrender, we are not truly surrendering to someone outside ourselves; rather, we surrender ourselves to ourselves. Through surrender begins the first stage of seeking. For when we seek solutions to all our troubles from the Creator, we must first surrender ourselves completely to Him. We always approach the Creator burdened with doubt, never having surrendered ourselves to Him at all. When a storm comes into our life and shatters us, we cry out: Where is the Creator now? Doubt about His supremacy takes root within us. Yet we have never approached Him with a full heart, with our whole being. We live in a hollow faith—we know the Creator exists, but we have never, before our troubles or after, surrendered ourselves wholly to Him. We make demands of a Creator we have never truly known, a Creator whose very existence we have doubted for years. With such a doubting heart, do we still dare ask for the Creator’s help? When we ourselves hurl doubts and questions—*Where is the Creator?*—how can we then lay our troubles before Him? Where the very foundation of our faith has been eaten away by doubt, how can we expect good results? Can any solution come to us from a Creator whose existence we continue to doubt?

One Hundred Four.

We must first shed all our doubts, free ourselves from the chains of ego, and surrender ourselves completely to the Creator, to His sovereignty. As if within me there is no “I,” I possess nothing, I am not a separate being—I am but a part of that complete existence. And if I am to know that existence, before I ask Him to solve all my problems, I must place my absolute trust in Him; I must surrender in my own emptiness. Only when we can place our mental doubts before the Creator and, unburdened, trust in Him alone—only then does our path to liberation begin. And this becomes possible only when we truly believe, with heart and soul, that the whole of existence springs from but a single reality. Nothing is true except that one existence. And whenever we surrender all our troubles with complete faith to the Creator, it finds its own true course; the fractured and tangled states within our heart break apart. For the Creator never needs to solve our problems—the solutions to all our troubles already lie within us. But we, deceived by our ego, have moved far from ourselves. And so what has no real existence, what never existed, now creates all manner of stagnation in our minds.

Our doubt, our disbelief has so weighed upon us that we have become terrible to ourselves. We fear to face our troubles head-on; we flee from them as if flight itself were the solution—because we have never been willing to confront our own doubts, never truly surrendered ourselves to ourselves.

# The Illusion of Certainty

And yet, standing before such difficult moments, we delude ourselves into believing that we know everything, that we possess solutions to all our questions, complete understanding of all our problems—even as we doubt our very existence, even as we flee from our own nature! We complicate our paths, yet seek simple solutions from them. We attempt to resolve the problem of our existence by denying existence itself, by running away from it—but how can flight ever yield answers? We face no problem whose solution belongs to another while we ourselves remain without one. We merely pose our questions in the wrong way, in the wrong places. And so each time we attempt to solve a problem, we only tangle it further. When we learn to ask questions rightly, the answers will present themselves plainly before our eyes. This is because every question we pose already contains its own answer within itself—yet we have never seen it revealed, simply because we have never known how to ask the question truly.

An illuminated soul knows how to question himself, and thus all things appear to him as simple truths. When we rush outward seeking the Creator elsewhere, we search for answers outside our questions, and so the Creator remains forever unknown and incomprehensible to us. The Creator is no imaginary being; He is our own manifest existence. This is why when we turn inward, back toward ourselves, we are in fact returning to our Creator. All our problems arise from our existence, and therefore all our solutions are possible only within our existence. When we ourselves cease to exist, there remains no problem at all. When the patient is absent, how can the disease remain present? Love for the Creator is our solution. When we bow before the Creator, it becomes prayer. Trust, love, faith in the Creator—all these are forms of our prayer to Him. And there are two paths to reach the Creator: one is prayer, the other is meditation. The path of meditation is the path of wisdom, of light—through which we may gain knowledge of ourselves and of all existence. Prayer means love, intimate companionship, the companionship of the Creator, the companionship of creation. Both these paths lead to the Creator.

In the realm of meditation, what remains the greatest obstacle until the very end is the ego, the sense of “I-ness.” Gaining complete mastery over one’s ego is the principal challenge of meditation. In the world of meditation, until the ego is conquered, it remains extraordinarily powerful, pressing down upon our shoulders with all its weight. The deeper we venture into meditation, the more formidable it becomes, redoubling its efforts to establish its dominion over us. If we cannot conquer the ego, meditation alone is insufficient for establishing connection with the Creator. For the ego creates a subtle glass wall between us and our Creator—through it we may see Him clearly enough, yet union with Him, merging into Him, hearing His voice becomes impossible. Only when we completely overcome our ego, when we sweep away all its sovereignty from within ourselves, does that supreme emptiness arise in us—that void which hungers to know our own existence, that vast absence that yearns to know the Creator. Only then.

It is precisely at that moment—when existence reveals itself to us, when it spontaneously lays bare all its secrets—that the Creator becomes one with us, resolves all our questions, and brings an end to every doubt that clouds our inner world. At this stage, there stands no wall between Creator and the one who meditates.

One Hundred Five.

When we truly love another, we must first dissolve ourselves—strip away every vanity that dwells within us, purge the ego from our depths, wrench it clean and cast it out. For ego is the weed in our garden; it stunts our growth, weakens our becoming. When we shed all ego, our inner space becomes transparent. Then whatever we plant there flourishes swiftly. As rain in nature washes all things clean, reviving the world, making all around luminous and pure, so too when we fully expel ego from within, our heart’s dust and grime are cleansed—the heart becomes unpolluted. Like the gentle, awakened earth, such a purified heart shines bright with life. To love is to dissolve oneself before love, to empty oneself and offer that emptiness. This is why one who loves truly has no need for meditation; their love is sufficient, though it must be pure, unblemished, untainted. Only those drenched in true love need not meditate, for their love *is* their prayer, and prayer brings us to the Creator’s presence far more swiftly than meditation. But we—most of us—do not know what true love is. We are not prepared for prayer, not prepared to love, because what we call love is not love at all. The true essence of love dwells far, far above where we stand.

We have never learned to love by emptying ourselves. We have never learned to surrender ourselves in love. There remains a gap somewhere in our loving, and from that gap emerges our deluded ego, directing us. When we are guided by this false ego, love’s infinite power is utterly destroyed. That love becomes weak, powerless—no longer an act of devotion, but a hollow shell we display before the one we claim to love. This is why meditation becomes necessary. Meditation teaches us to become one with ourselves within ourselves; through it, our sense of “I” gradually settles, and when it settles completely, true love is born. Therefore, those who do not know what true love is must first sit in meditation. Meditation teaches us to know ourselves; through it, our inner world stands revealed before us; through it, we see all that is good and ill, beautiful and ugly within. Thus it helps us cleanse all impurity. Because meditation can be practiced beyond ego, we can reach a stage where ego is finally shed—something far harder to achieve through prayer alone.

# Love, Self-Knowledge, and the Surrender of the Self

One can love oneself fully only when one becomes capable of knowing oneself completely—and knowing oneself becomes possible only when we are able to bring our naked truth before ourselves, in all its entirety. When we learn to love ourselves through complete self-knowledge, then we become authentic toward those we love and toward love itself; we can give ourselves wholly, for there is no deception within us, nothing we need hide from ourselves.

A cheap and universal affliction of this age is that we are all profoundly egoistic. We believe ourselves perfect; we harbor the illusion that nothing is wrong within us. When we convince ourselves that there is no fault in us, that we are complete and flawless, we ask: why should we surrender? The very fact that we are so visibly driven by our ego makes this plain. And because we regard ourselves as perfect, the next step follows inevitably: we see no need to surrender. Thus our ego exerts its crude dominion over us unchecked. This is why we must practice meditation—for only when we penetrate meditation to its deepest reaches do we become worthy of prayer. It is through meditation that we enter the depths of prayer. There comes a moment when meditation dies, yet prayer does not. Knowledge, meditation—these have an end; but love has no end. Yet to find love, we must descend into the profound depths of meditation.

Our prayer is the Creator; our prayer is love. To pray means to become a lover, a worshipper, something worshipped. How wise a lover is matters little; what matters is how deeply he can love, where he is heading, at what stage of love he stands and toward what stage he moves. Prayer is not the chief knowledge, yet to become a true worshipper, a true lover, one must possess wisdom. For without illumination we cannot know which path we walk or toward which direction we move. This is why, when a surrendered heart faces difficulty, he places all his troubles before the Creator’s threshold. But an ego-bound heart turns toward its own intellect—and here lies the distinction between a true lover and a mere expert. We imagine all our solutions rest within ourselves; thus we busy ourselves solving our own troubles. But a true lover never confines his problems within the smallness of himself. He sees his troubles within the whole, and so seeks refuge in Him who is the source of all.